Mission Bundles...

[Crafty_Pat]

The assumption here is that the presence of any single item within the team is an automatic benefit to all characters, even if only one of them uses it. Everyone else is still benefitting from that character's edge, so everyone should see the same balance effect. Sure, you could change this for your home games if you disagree. It is, after all, your License to Improvise, but that's the way we've chosen to balance the official rules, and therefore LSpy.

That looks like it's running right up to saying "if one person gets the bundle, everyone gets the bundle" without actually saying that. 

While we're clarifying, is that in fact what we're meant to derive from the above statement?

Nope. Just because you only get one of each item does not mean that each of those items is any less useful to the entire team. Much the opposite, actually.

[Mister Andersen]

No offense to the author, but I'd argue that the problem here is with the mission, not the rules - at least in this regard.

No, there are some pretty fundamental problems with the rules, though I would agree their implementation in this instance was also rather sub optimal.

There are a bunch of fundamental precepts backing the gear rules, but let's highlight two...

1. Nothing's free (even when you need it). The assumption is that there's always another option. Years of writing and running Spycraft has proven that to us. By that token, all bundles are optional. Honestly, presenting a mission with only one course of action is - IMO and again with all due respect to the LSpy mission authors - unrealistic and short-sighted. It's easy to make that assumption, of course, especially if you're under time pressure to get the mission out, but it's still sub-optimal presentation. And even if there really is only one true option, it should cost you to gain the necessary gear. It would if bundles didn't exist - in the form of Possessions or mission picks - and not having to devote those should incur a penalty. That's balanced.

No it's not, because that assumption is, in part, building upon the single greatest flaw in the gear system.

2. Gear is team-based. What we found with first ed. is that everyone pools picks. That's the reality. So we try to keep the 2.0 gear rules as team-oriented as possible. The assumption here is that the presence of any single item within the team is an automatic benefit to all characters, even if only one of them uses it. Everyone else is still benefitting from that character's edge, so everyone should see the same balance effect. Sure, you could change this for your home games if you disagree. It is, after all, your License to Improvise, but that's the way we've chosen to balance the official rules, and therefore LSpy.

That's illuminatory, but again based on a flawed premise.

Pooling picks is all well and good, but utterly useless when you're talking indivisible singular items that an entire team or randomly determined size requires simultaneously. A single radio is useless if you have to communicate with anyone who isn't so equipped, and you can't have five people all getting into a government facility at the same time by using just the one ID. You designed the NPC rules so that groups of NPCs could have a singular item between them, so surely it would have made sence to establish a similar mechanic for the gearing up of PCs.

One of the problems I have with the 2.0 gear system is the way you've forced classes to have certain predefined categories for their mission picks - soldiers HAVE to have weapon picks, Hackers HAVE to have electronics, wheelmen HAVE to have vehicles - rather than to me the more logical and emminently simpler approach of saying "your class grants you n number of picks: choose their type as appropriate to needs of the mission".

As it stands, forcing gear categories on classes, while thematically attractively, seems to create most of the situations where a mission bundle is necessary. The statement "It would [cost them] if bundles didn't exist - in the form of Possessions or mission picks - and not having to devote those should incur a penalty" might be justified if players had any sort of real choice in what mission gear picks were available to them. In any given LSpy module, it's purely random chance for any given team to possess picks optimal to the mission profile, and that's through no fault of the players but rather that of the game mechanics.

Rather than penalising teams for using bundles that in many cases aren't about granting any sort of edge but only mere competency, they should be actively rewarded for not doing so.

[Gentry]

Just because you only get one of each item does not mean that each of those items is any less useful to the entire team. Much the opposite, actually.

I'm not grasping what that sentence is saying.  In the specific case that brought this thread on, how does someone getting a single Cover ID benefit the entire team? 

[Psion]

I'm not grasping what that sentence is saying.  In the specific case that brought this thread on, how does someone getting a single Cover ID benefit the entire team? 

Well, it's fine if you only need one "inside man". But if the whole team needs them, that's different. Which is why I think regular cost for 1 item, x2 for equipping the whole team, is a decent compromise.

[NezMaster]

I tend to look at things from the agencies point of view. "We want your team to infiltrate the party, and mingle with the guests. Heres an invitation for your group of five."
"Is that all you could get"..
"No..they're easy to get, you can have one for everyone, which I'm sure you'll need, but you have to ask for it, and we'll give you less equipment if you do."

??

I try to think outside the mechanics and what the agency would give you. That being the case, the game where everyone needs to go into Siberia in the winter, but the agency doesn't know that at the missions start, does not get cold gear in the mission package. If they have no reserve picks, they might have a problem...

Since i only run home games at this point, I just throw them things if the AGENCY (not me) thinks they will need them. I mean, they may have a budget, but they aren't stupid. From this perspective, I see few situations where they would only provide '1' radio or anything like that.

[Crafty_Pat]

You could certainly provide more radios to the team - one for everyone! - in a mission bundle. The rules allow for that. Does it increase the (rather minute) XP penalty? Yes. Should it? Yes. The x2 multiplier for an entire team getting gear is interesting, but it breaks down with certain items. Doubling the XP penalty so everyone gets a tactical radio? Sure. Doubling it for laptops? No frakking way.

The bottom line is that we fundamentally disagree about how the gear system should work. What some of you call flaws, we call features. That's fine. You'll hopefully like the Big Score systems more, but we're not changing the main gear system because we feel that it does exactly what it needs to: it offers a small (read: easily managed) and themed (read: cinematic) collection of items to each character, and by extension the team. That's all it needs to do. It's not about simulating, collecting, purchasing, trading, optimizing, or gloating. In fact, it intentionally takes the focus off gear and places it back on the characters where it belongs.

Bundles are there so a GC can include items that are required to complete a mission, or that he thinks the group should need, or that the team's organization/supporters think they should need. No matter how a mission bundle is justified, though, it should always incur a penalty because it's giving the team something they don't otherwise have. You want just one inside man? That's a smaller cost than the entire team going in. It's logical to us. We understand that some of you find the penalty harsh, but we disagree. It's balanced,  and for that matter negligible, so to us it's a non-issue.

[Psion]

You could certainly provide more radios to the team - one for everyone! - in a mission bundle. The rules allow for that. Does it increase the (rather minute) XP penalty? Yes. Should it? Yes. The x2 multiplier for an entire team getting gear is interesting, but it breaks down with certain items. Doubling the XP penalty so everyone gets a tactical radio? Sure. Doubling it for laptops? No frakking way.

Since the mission bundle is provided by the GC or module writer, I don't think that's as much of an issue if they players got their meat hooks into it.

The bottom line is that we fundamentally disagree about how the gear system should work. What some of you call flaws, we call features. That's fine. You'll hopefully like the Big Score systems more, but we're not changing the main gear system because we feel that it does exactly what it needs to: it offers a small (read: easily managed) and themed (read: cinematic) collection of items to each character, and by extension the team. That's all it needs to do. It's not about simulating, collecting, purchasing, trading, optimizing, or gloating. In fact, it intentionally takes the focus off gear and places it back on the characters where it belongs.

Big Score might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater for me. I don't think the *whole* basic gear system is broken. Just the principle of charging a cost by the square of the number of players for non-unique items in a mission bundle. To me, it would sort of be like making every player pay for gear picks for the whole party if more than one of them wants to have something. It just doesn't make sense to me.

[Crafty_Pat]

Big Score might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater for me. I don't think the *whole* basic gear system is broken. Just the principle of charging a cost by the square of the number of players for non-unique items in a mission bundle. To me, it would sort of be like making every player pay for gear picks for the whole party if more than one of them wants to have something. It just doesn't make sense to me.

It's one of the ways Spycraft differs from your average RPG. It's very strongly a team-oriented game, when things are good, when things are bad, and at every point in-between.